By Shohrukhkhon Bekhzodiy & Sarvarbek Turaev, UWED undergraduates, interns at IAIS
The United States of America remains the most powerful state in the contemporary international system across all key aggregate indicators. The country's defense budget in 2025 reached approximately $850 billion, exceeding the combined expenditure of the next nine states globally. The United States maintains approximately 750 military installations abroad, commands the world’s only carrier fleet capable of simultaneous operations across all oceans, and fields an armed force with the logistical capacity to project power to any theater of military operations.
Yet it is precisely this uncontested dominance that gives rise to a fundamental question: why does a state possessing such unprecedented military and economic potential systematically fail to achieve its declared strategic objectives?
The United States is losing global influence not as a consequence of rising competitor power, but as a result of a systemic inability to convert available potential into durable strategic outcomes. This incapacity is not the product of errors made by any particular administration; it is institutional in origin and reproduces itself regardless of who occupies the White House. Military power is deployed without political strategy. Economic coercion dismantles the dependencies upon which American leverage depends. Diplomatic commitments are violated with regularity, undermining the very possibility of trust in the American word. Alliances that historically multiplied American power are being transformed into relationships of coercion from which partners seek to disengage. Domestically, a political system incapable of ensuring strategic continuity renders any long-term American commitment structurally unreliable.
Since the early 2000s, the United States has conducted large-scale military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The aggregate direct costs of these conflicts exceeded several trillion dollars. The outcomes speak for themselves: Afghanistan returned to Taliban control within days of the American withdrawal; Iraq became an arena of Iranian influence that was substantially amplified as a direct consequence of American intervention; Libya fragmented into competing armed factions; and Syria was, until recently, de facto partitioned among Russia, Iran, and Turkey, none of which represented Washington's preferred actors.
This pattern is not attributable to tactical miscalculation or circumstantial misfortune. It is structural in nature. American armed forces demonstrate high effectiveness at the operational level. They are capable of defeating adversaries, seizing territory, and neutralizing discrete threats. However, military victory and political stabilization constitute fundamentally distinct objectives. An army can break a state, but it cannot build one. It is precisely this systemic incapacity that recurs from one conflict to the next.
The legal dimension of this problem is equally significant. The United States Constitution originally distributed war powers between two branches of government. By law, Congress declares war, and the President wages it. In practice, however, this system has long ceased to function as designed.
The pivotal moment was the War Powers Resolution of 1973, enacted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War with the aim of restoring Congressional oversight of decisions to use force. The Resolution stipulated that the President must terminate any unauthorized military operation within 60 days absent explicit Congressional authorization. This appeared to be a reasonable constraining mechanism. In practice, it was systematically dismantled by legal counsel across administrations of both parties.
The Reagan administration maintained that strikes against Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf in 1987 to 1988 constituted “isolated incidents” that did not trigger the 60-day clock. The Obama administration argued that sustained bombing of Libya beyond 60 days did not constitute "hostilities" within the meaning of the Resolution. The Biden administration contended that a yearlong campaign against the Houthis in Yemen required no Congressional authorization because the Houthis had fired first on American vessels. Each successive administration produced new legal justifications, and each generation of lawyers inherited the precedents of its predecessor, not by overturning them, but by building upon them.
The result is a system in which a single individual may initiate war without parliamentary deliberation, without public articulation of success criteria, and without genuine accountability for outcomes. It is within this system that the attack on Iran under Operation “Epic Fury” became possible, carried out without a formal declaration of war and without a Congressional vote. The problem here is not the character of any particular president. The problem is that the institutional architecture designed to ensure deliberateness in military decisions was gradually, lawfully, and with the complicity of all branches of government dismantled.
This arrangement is not neutral in its consequences. A war initiated without broad political consensus and without clearly defined success criteria is, with high probability, a war that will be poorly managed, poorly concluded, and inadequately understood after its termination. Such is the historical record of the past two decades.
Throughout much of the postwar period, the United States grounded its global presence in a conceptual framework that transcended narrow national interest. The liberal international order, for which Washington served as architect, rested on the assumption that open markets, multilateral institutions, and collective security arrangements served the interests of both the United States and its partners. This logic of mutual benefit conferred a degree of legitimacy upon American leadership in the eyes of the international community.
The current approach constitutes a fundamental departure from this tradition. American foreign policy is increasingly organized around a model that may be characterized as “transactional extractivism,” wherein every international interaction is evaluated in terms of what Washington receives immediately, rather than what long-term strategic order it sustains. Allies are perceived not as partners in a collective security system, but as debtors obligated to pay for protection rendered. International institutions are regarded primarily as constraints rather than instruments. Multilateral formats are replaced by bilateral negotiations in which America’s structural superiority guarantees an asymmetric outcome.
An important qualification must be acknowledged. Criticism of the former multilateral model is not without foundation. Global climate mechanisms systematically failed to meet declared targets amid rising emissions. The World Trade Organization proved incapable of disciplining China's subsidy policies. The International Atomic Energy Agency did not prevent nuclear proliferation by Iran or North Korea. The wager of the 1990s and 2000s that deep integration of China into the global economy would transform its political behavior proved to be strategically naive. In this sense, demands for a reassessment of the international architecture rest on genuine grounds.
Nevertheless, a fundamental distinction exists between reforming instruments and destroying them. The institutions, alliances, and norms that the United States constructed over eight decades constituted not a burden but a multiplier of American power. They enabled Washington to shape the international agenda without recourse to direct coercion at every turn. By abandoning these instruments in pursuit of short-term tactical gains, the United States does not liberate itself from constraints; it voluntarily dismantles the architecture of its own influence.
III. Alliance Erosion and Weakening Diplomacy
The aggregate power of the American alliance system has historically far exceeded what the country could achieve unilaterally. NATO, bilateral security agreements in the Asia-Pacific region, and partnerships in the Middle East together formed a global network that provided Washington with persistent presence, intelligence-sharing, logistical support, and political legitimacy on a scale unattainable by any competitor.
The current trajectory of engagement with allies is eroding this model. The question of burden-sharing within NATO has been reformulated from a discussion of shared responsibility into an ultimatum: pay more, or commitments will be reconsidered. Such language transforms a collective security alliance into something resembling a system of commercial patronage, where protection is provided in exchange for financial contribution rather than on the basis of shared values and strategic interests.
The consequences have been swift. Canada, bound to the United States by the most extensive trade, intelligence, and defense ties in the Western world, is openly reorienting its foreign economic strategy. The current government has embarked on a course of trading partner diversification, concluded new agreements with Indonesia and India, and initiated diplomatic rapprochement with Beijing. This is not an ideological rupture. It is the pragmatic response of a state that has concluded its principal partner is unreliable.
Europe displays analogous dynamics. NATO member states are indeed increasing defense expenditures, and their aggregate volume has grown by more than 100 percent since 2019, driven primarily by countries on the eastern flank. However, this increase does not reflect confidence in American guarantees; it is a response to their evident unreliability. European governments are arming themselves because they cannot afford to rely on Washington.
The diplomatic picture is no more encouraging. In Ukraine, the promise to end the war within 24 hours yielded more than a year of inconclusive negotiations during which the United States periodically adopted positions that objectively aligned with Russian demands. In February 2025, Washington voted alongside Moscow in the United Nations on resolutions relating to the Russian invasion. On Gaza, the United States exercised its veto power in the Security Council six times against ceasefire resolutions, even as combat operations continued and famine conditions in the enclave were confirmed. The January 2025 ceasefire collapsed within weeks after Israel resumed its strikes.
The Iranian case merits separate analysis. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was functioning: Iran had dismantled two-thirds of its centrifuges, removed 98 percent of its enriched uranium, and opened facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the agreement. By March 2025, Iran had accumulated more than 275 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, sufficient for several nuclear warheads upon further enrichment. Negotiations initiated in April 2025 reached an impasse. The United States demanded the complete cessation of enrichment; Iran refused. In June 2025, Operation “Midnight Hammer” destroyed key facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. However, Iran's stockpiles of highly enriched uranium appear to have been evacuated in advance, and their location remains unknown.
On February 28, 2026, Operation “Epic Fury” followed, in the course of which Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed and missile production facilities, the naval fleet, and dual-use installations were destroyed. Tactically, the operation achieved its stated objectives. Strategically, it created a fundamentally new problem: a state whose nuclear infrastructure has been destroyed, but whose knowledge and motivation remain intact and are now reinforced by an existential imperative to acquire deterrent capability at any cost.
The concluding logic of all three cases is identical: the United States entered each situation with maximum coercive potential and exited with a worse outcome than it had at the outset.
An analysis of American foreign policy dysfunction would be incomplete without examining its domestic political determinants. Several interconnected structural processes undermine the capacity of the United States to conduct coherent international policy irrespective of the personnel of any given administration.
The first is deep partisan polarization, which renders strategic continuity practically unattainable. The divergence between the foreign policy courses of successive administrations is so pronounced that allies are compelled to recalculate long-term projections with every change in the White House. An international agreement concluded by one president may be denounced by his successor within the first week of office. This is precisely what occurred with the JCPOA in 2018 and with the Paris Climate Agreement. Notably, within the Republican Party itself, a significant gap has emerged between traditional conservative internationalism and the current administration's course. A number of Republican senators publicly expressed concern over the curtailment of support for Ukraine and the weakening of the American position in NATO, yet party discipline under Trump's second term proved sufficiently rigid to suppress this dissent at the level of actual votes.
The second process is mounting public discontent, which since 2025 has assumed organized forms. The "No Kings" movement became one of the most significant episodes of civic protest in recent American history. The first wave occurred on June 14, 2025. According to organizers’ estimates, between four and six million people participated in actions across more than 2,100 cities. The second wave in October 2025 encompassed approximately 2,700 locations nationwide, drawing an estimated five to seven million participants by various accounts. The third wave occurred on March 28, 2026, against the backdrop of the war with Iran and continuing mass deportations, and was announced by organizers as the largest day of nonviolent action in American history. The movement's name itself reflected the substance of its grievances: protesters invoked the foundational principle of American statecraft, according to which power belongs to the people and not to an officeholder who has arrogated monarchical authority. Of particular note, the third wave of protests was explicitly directed against the war with Iran, a rare instance in which domestic political dissent was directly linked to a specific foreign policy operation.
These processes mutually reinforce one another. Polarization forecloses strategic continuity. Public discontent narrows the domestic political mandate for global leadership. Taken together, they indicate that the defanging of the American predator is predominantly systemic rather than personal in origin. It is embedded in the institutional architecture of American politics and will not disappear with any change of administration.
Conclusion
The United States possesses the greatest aggregate power potential in the contemporary international system, and yet it exhibits a persistent inability to convert that potential into durable strategic outcomes. The gap between available power and achieved results is not incidental but structurally determined.
This gap is produced at the intersection of several interacting deficits: the displacement of strategic conception by transactional calculation; the destruction of the influence multipliers constituted by alliances and institutions; the deployment of economic instruments in a manner that accelerates the diversification of dependencies; the exhaustion of diplomatic credibility in key conflict zones; and the absence of a domestic political architecture capable of ensuring strategic continuity.
At the same time, it would be erroneous to interpret the foregoing analysis as a forecast of irreversible decline. The United States retains structural advantages without parallel: geographic security, the depth of its technological base, control over the world's reserve currency, and military capacity that exceeds any competitor. The question is not whether the United States has lost its potential. The question is whether it is capable of constructing the political and institutional architecture that would allow that potential to be realized.
If the current trajectory persists, the international system will adapt, not because others become stronger, but because predictability and reliability will migrate to other nodes of the system. A predator that has lost the capacity for consistent action does not disappear from the ecosystem. It simply ceases to defineit.
* The Institute for Advanced International Studies (IAIS) does not take institutional positions on any issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IAIS.
